夢遊病者: Psychedelic Black Metal Alchemists Issue Brand New 12" EP - Track Unveiled at Invisible Oranges

Sentient Ruin is honored to renew our alliance with multinational experimental black metal alchemists 夢遊病者 (Sleepwalker). Now a world-renowned phenomenon in the extreme/experimental underground, 夢遊病者 return with another catastrophic mindfuck of shapeshifting and disorienting psychedelic black metal mastery that will shatter your synapses. 

Ѫ ("Yus") represents a crossing of worlds between the old and the new, the passing of power and skill from ancestor to youth and their successes and failures, the portal between distinct cultures, the obsolete alphabets and their new acquired meanings and the evolution of language and it’s proxy disciplines like music. While in Buddhism, the zen concept of 無 signifies “nothingness”, “not having” and the “absence of something”, it’s obsolete variant Yus (Ѫ) or modern “У” in Cyrillic, implies “to be near” or to be “in possession of”. In Traditional Chinese, the symbol denotes “shaman” or “sorcerer”, while in Eastern Mari “У” connotes the idea of the “new”. This sometimes contradictory cross-cultural phenomenon of dying language and obsolete literary systems taking on new meaning and symbolism was the inspiration for this short EP. Can a creation live on—if even in other forms— like offspring, or will it simply perish with time?

Invisible Oranges has premiered the track First Utterance starting that “pure nightmare fuel with a folksy crunch“ - you can listen and read their feature HERE.

As per tradition Ѫ, is yet another work in which 夢遊病者 leave the listener blindsided and stranded in a place of utter disbelief, marvel, and complete implausibility. 夢遊病者 are able to distill black metal and ritualistic psychedelia unlike anyone has ever done or even ever fathomed before. A meticulous distillation of styles, a breadth of musical knowledge and expertise in the most experimental realms of abstract music that has few rivals around, and finally, the vision, dare we say insanity, to ponder the impossible as feasible and execute it flawlessly against all skepticism. On paper, 夢遊病者’s formula seems impossible and unlikely, yet it exists, its essence ungraspable and far out of reach, its mystery and marvel oppressing in their unquestionable enormity.

Ѫ is scheduled for release on April 26 2019 through Sentient Ruin in North America and Babylon Doom cult Records in the EU, and will be issued as a single-sided etched black 12" LP housed in a custom black heavy cardstock fold-over cover and insert screenptined with metallic silver ink. A limited run of long sleeve shirts has also been made available from Sentient Ruin exclusively to celebrate what is perhaps the most insane chapter in the 夢遊病者 saga so far.

SUTEKH HEXEN: American Undisputed Icons of Ritualistic Black Noise Prepare Release of Massive Brand New 2XLP - Tracks Premiered at Indy Metal Vault and Heathen Harvest.

We’re truly honored to welcome the comeback of US Black Ambient veterans Sutekh Hexen. Both defiant and meditative, their latest self-titled full-length and first proper studio album furthers the project’s inquiry into opposition, endurance, and paradox. Both hypnotic and cruel, these ten highly charged tracks transgress yet again any previously imposed boundaries while upholding their raw ethos at its root, and at times defying the listener's expectations altogether. Though tempestuous as ever, with this work, Sutekh Hexen reaches across thresholds and thrusts longtime listeners into redefined spaces: haunted disorientation, surreal agony, the distress of buried forces surfacing, a revelation of black tongues. Each track is a rite of clandestine horror through a distillation of power-ambient, industrial, and black metal deconstructionism. This is a new era of Sutekh Hexen, and it is a sharpening of their blade, a merciless lucidity.

The album’s colossal aura and merciless execution is the result of a team effort of sorts with many contributors from the Bay Area and beyond lending their talents to harness a realm of sonic deconstruction of unseen force and magnitude - among them Von’s legendary vocalist/bassist Venien, BLSPHM’s Demian Johnston, and members of Lead Eater, Terror Cell Unit, and beyond.

The self titled double album will be officially released on March 29 2019 digitally, and as a stacked 2X cassette tape with two j-cards, silkscreened slipcase, and download card, limited to just 100 units. A 2LP edition pressed on black vinyl will also see the light through Sentient Ruin in the western hemisphere in a limited edition of only 150 units, while 150 more will be released in the EU by Cyclic Law along with a CD version.

Take a glimpse into the wretched and disembodied realm of aural chaos that Sutekh Hexen’s have summoned on their new album courtesy of Indy Metal Vault and Heathen Harvest, both of which have premiered a track off the album each, lauding the band’s new effort for its malevolent sonic mastery and grandiose weaving and layering of dark matter and shadows emanating from the void.

In the realm of extreme and otherworldly sounds, few entities have reached the peaks of cacophony and sonic disintegration touched by Bay Area blackened noise cult miscreants Sutekh Hexen. The ultra-prolific black noise sorcerers from Oakland have thus far amassed, in less than a decade into existence, a massive discography that touches depths of endarkenment and musical disembodiment that are almost impossible to understand. With releases being put out on cult labels like Magic Bullet, Cold Spring, Handmade Birds, Holy Terror, and Black Horizons, Sutekh Hexen have established them selves as absolute leaders in the realm of avantgarde ritualistic black metal and (un)sacred industrial/ambient/noise manifestations. Every release by the Oakland combo has been a stepping stone of sorts, showing an incredibly evolving trajecotry in their endless and ever-morphing vomiting of sublime cacophony, and displaying an array of influences and of ways of layering sound that make the band seem completely otherworldly. Like a smoldering, buzzing, hissing and screaming void of monstrous and unshackled chaos, Sutekh Hexen have been (along with their peers Gnaw Their Tongues, BLSPHM, Wold, Theologian, Murmuüre, Thisquietarmy etc.) the authors of some of the most uncompromising, scorching, spectral, and visionary ambient black metal ever put to tape.


DECOHERENCE: Haunting Debut 7" by UK Black Metal Destroyers to See the Light April 5 2019.

Sentient Ruin is honored and proud to partake in the first breath upon this world by debuting UK-based black metal enigma Decoherence. In strict adherence to black metal’s most hermetic and orthodox ways, Decoherence have stripped them selves of any human element to allow the music to solely speak for itself and come from a place of utter inhumanity devoid of any warmth or familiarity. As such biographies, social media, websites, identities, names and the such have been completely ignored in favor of the audio visual elements of the release which remain the sole focal point of the band’s craft and the only thing which the band has deemed meaningful in its hideous and isolationist attempt at communicating its wretched message. What has been disclosed to Sentient Ruin is that all music and recording is by Stroda in the UK, while vocals are by Tahazu, based in the US. 

Musically Decoherence remain firm in their homage to black metal’s proudest and most traditional roots, following in the footsteps of the forefathers of Scandinavian black metal like Marduk, Watain, Mayhem etc, while also vastly exploring uncharted and alien worlds of inhuman origin and mystique through the sapient weaving of grandiose and disorientating structures of pure sonic black matter, akin to those previously explored by bands like Darkspace, Funeral Mist, Aosoth, Leviathan, Skaphé, and Wormlust.

The result are two massive and chaotic movements of distilled and purified darkness incarnated among terrain existence to remind humanity of the darkness and unknown forces that permeate existence and constantly threaten all life, serving the will of entropy, chaos, destruction, evil, and inescapability.

As an initial offering to taste what is tome come, the band have made the first untitled track form the release available for listening over at Invisible Oranges

Symbolizing the blood of humanity being spilled every second in honor of futility and nothing, Decoherence’s debut self-tiled debut EP comes a limited run of 200 clear red vinyl 7”s housed in a custom made fold-over cover of blood red heavy stock silkscreened with black ink, and with abstract horror visual creations lent for the purpose by dark surrealism luminary Stephen Wilson.

Decoherence s/t 7”s can now be pre-ordered from Bandcamp and our store and are scheduled for an April 5 2019 official ship/release date.

HOLD ME DOWN: Sentient Ruin To Unleash Virginia's Nihilist Industrial Act's Debut EP on Limited Edition Cassette.

Sentient Ruin is proud to bring you a straight-to digital/tape "flash release" of the debut EP by Virginia based post-industrial act Hold Me Down, a new band featuring one member of virginian industrial black metal and Sentient Ruin stalwart act AMERICAN. Digitally self-released by the band in January 2019, and now seeing its first proper pressing in physical format, the self-titled EP will come as a limited run of 100 tapes intended to be sold as an online Sentient Ruin exclusive only, and shipping on April 5 2019. These tapes will be available on our store and or at Bandcamp exclusively and nowhere else.

Worshipping directly at the dystopian altar of bands like Skinny Puppy, early Ministry, and Godlfesh, Virginia's Hold Me Down debut with an EP of mezmerising industrial metal chaos and post-modern sonic deconstructionism set to annihilate the mind and torment the flesh with no solution of continuity. Within these seven cold and baneful cuts of mechanical aural pandemonium the listener will be drawn into a lifeless and colorless world of ruin and destruction where machines and deviant technology have replaced flesh and sanity and reduced man to a pale and fading memory, annihilated by its own delusions and exterminated by its own creations and mind. Subtle touches of harsh noise, power electronics, and black metal amalgamated in the mix round out a debut of absolutely mind-defiling cruelty.

LEATHER GLOVE: Experimental Death-Doom Entity Envisioned by Renowned Sound Engineer Greg Wilkinson Readies Massive Debut LP - Track Premiered at No Clean Singing.

Sentient Ruin is proud and honored to renew the unholy pact with Greg Wilkinson after having released his debut demo tape as Leather Glove back in 2016 .

Renowned American extreme metal sound engineer Greg Wilkison (of Brainoil, Deathgrave, ex. Laudanum, ex. Graves at Sea) owner and founder/operator of the legendary Earhammer Studios in Oakland CA (Noothgrush, Necrot, Autopsy, Vastum, Acephalix, Mortuous, Undergang, countless others) brings you his first ever solo full-length effort under the Leather Glove moniker. Standing somewhere between the caveman tank-like death metal approach of Coffins and Undergang, and the hallucinogenic sonic derailment of bands like Swans and Zeni Geva, in this debut long player of deviant and shapeshifting death-doom destruction Greg is aided by drummers Chad Gailey (Necrot, Vastum, Mortuous, Atrament, etc) and Dustin Ferris (Apraxic, Pleasure Cross, Engorged, etc) to unleash thirty minutes of cerebral and disgusting aural mayhem, smashing together death metal, D beat, crust, sludge, doom, and industrial noise to summon a low end monster of deranged experimentalism and of unspeakable heaviness. Ripping guitar solos laid down by bastion Bay Area metal shredders like Sean McGrath (Ghoul, Impaled), Shelby Lermo (Vastum, Ulthar, Extremity), Eric Cutler (Autopsy), and Danny Corrales (Autopsy, Abcess) round out a debut release of absolutely incinerating intensity.

No Clean Singing have premiered the track Reflections of Despair, which you can listen to HERE, remarking on its “immense destructive power”.

Perpetual Animation drops officially on March 8 2019 on tape, digital, and US vinyl via Sentient Ruin, while an EU vinyl version will be handled by Dawnbreed Records. Pre-orders now live on our store or Bandcamp.

Listen as the oscillations rattle your ears and crawl under your skin. If life is the waiting room to hell, then this is the bellowing sounds encapsulating every molecule in the room. Conceptualized by Greg Wilkinson, owner-engineer of Eearhammer Studios in Oakland, Leather Glove is a grim sonic tapestry of pure oppression. The project spawned in Oct 2014 as a recording experiment with a goal to achieve a collection of songs that counter the common production values in modern metal recordings known for punchy, scooped, and clear tones. An antithesis being deep tones, too much mid range, B standard tuning, low vocals, big drum shells and anything else that would make death metal mixing difficult. Oppressive, grotesque, filthy, uncomfortable, and slightly sleazy while remaining intelligible and letting the music speak for itself was the end desired effect.

Greg's debut offering as Leather Glove, was the Skin On Glass demo from 2016, twelve plus minutes of thick textures incorporating elements from d-beat, doom, sludge, and noise rock all smashed through a death metal filter if played on a slow record player. While sounding nothing like the inspirations for this release, a few main derivatives you may detect are: tempos akin to Coffins, grossness and deep tones of Undergang, grooves of Brainoil, and repeating chromatic phrases with delayed guitars inspired by Zeni Geva and Swans. To rhythmically make this possible, Chad Galey, famed drummer for power house bands Necrot, Atrament, and Rude clobbered the skins while Greg filled all other layers, recored, mixed and mastered at Earhammer studio in 2014, while work on debut LP Perpetual Animation commenced soon after.

MISCARRIAGE: Multinational Extreme Gore-Doom Duo Set to Release Inhumanly Crushing New Album - Tracks Premiered at Decibel Magazine and Metal Injection.

Sentient Ruin is honored to be the release gateway to Imminent Horror - the new release by Swedish/American extreme sludge monstrosity Miscarriage, set to be released on February 22 2019 on digital/cassette, with a vinyl release also planned (TBA).

If you ever thought a slower and more atmospheric and cerebral “sludge version” of infamously fringe and violent extreme metal bands like Revenge or Pissgrave was just a silly pipe dream, think again... Like an acid trip that goes totally wrong just as you enter a torture dungeon of unnameable horrors and begin to allucinate before the most harrowing cruelty and inhumanity, Miscarriage’s new album and Sentient Ruin debut Imminent Horror is a work which defies logic and sanity in its insurmountable display of violence, darkness, and barely comprehensible chaos. Set to become one of the most shockingly violent, depraved, unsettling, and horrific albums of 2019, Imminent Horror seems to have crossed a new and never before seen threshold in extreme metal, taking the genre to a sickening new realm never before explored, and never before fathomed, not even by the sickest and most fucked up minds. Structured around a churning morass of hallucinatory atmospheres, derailing, discordant, and appallingly dense and downtrend guitar warfare, an illogically oppressive and unpredictable rhythm section, and a swarming haze of flesh-tearing screams, the songs on this abomination incarnated seem to want to reach out into a realm of the absurd to harness a level of hatred and destruction of unseen magnitude and plausibility. With their post-Carcass noisecore/goregrind roots firmly anchored at the base, Miscarriage have augmented the foundations of their sound and built an entire new world above it by bringing in elements of slower and more experimental and atmospheric extreme music coming from a sickening cesspool of influences as diverse as early Swans, Primitive Man, Corrupted, Ride for Revenge, Godflesh and extreme black metal, to materialize an aural abomination of near-incomprehensible horror. Classic homemade gore-drenched artwork and lyrics that can not and should not be ever unearthed for one's mental sanity and safe sleep round out a release of absolutely incinerating hatred and despondency whose sole existence is already an inexplainable mystery.

Both Metal Injection and Decibel Magazine have expressed awe and wonder at Miscarriage’s horrific craft, each premiering a track each from the album, and exclaiming that Imminent Horror is “Inconceivable“ and “an exhausting listen“. Read their features HERE and HERE.

With its two members working remotely and spread between Sweden and the USA, Miscarriage initially formed as a gorenoise/noisegrind studio project influenced by the deranged craft of goregrind bands like early Carcass, Prostitute Disfigurement, Disgorged, etc. The mysterious duo first appeared in 2017 with their Disposed Abomination full length, displaying a chaotic, aberrant, and deranged blend of goregrind and noisecore akin to the wretched craft of icons like Full of Hell, Blood, and Anal Cunt. Soon after the band unleashed three albums at once: their Homicidal Mania” I, II, and III series which later became the Homicidal Mania Trilogy comp released on CD in Belgium by BRC-30 Productions. At this stage, while the band violently and blindly plowed through it’s mindless assault of sickening noisegrind for a staggering 70+ minutes and 30 tracks of unyielding aural terror, the initial elements of the nightmare-inducing metamorphosis they were undergoing began to show, first hinting at the horror to come as song lengths increased, structures became more abstract and erratic, tempos became unpredictable, and atmospheres overall became more overbearing, violent, and hallucinatory. Soon enough, sole masterminds J.P, and U.N. had began to disfigure and abuse their own creation even more to a point of incomprehensible absurdity and beyond recognition, adding to their already defiled and depraved strain of nightmarish music music even more layers of violence, darkness, and seething depravity. This is when their appalling Sentient Ruin debut album Imminent Horror began taking shape. Seemingly losing all connections to reality or any form of self control, Miscarriage collapsed under their own impulse to destroy and steered their aberrant creation into a place of unimaginable darkness and horror from which their would be no return.



VESSEL OF INIQUITY: UK Black/Death/Noise Monstrosity Announces Devastating Sophomore Offering - Track Premiered at Invisible Oranges.

UK one-man aural annihilation entity Vessel of Iniquity has completed work its sophomore LP for Sentient Ruin, set to be released on January 25 2019. The album will come as a limited edition 45RPM black or sea blue vinyl LP with custom artwork, and as a limited edition cassette tape. Both formats will also be available in the EU through Italian underground label Xenoglossy Productions.

Once again crafted and home-recorded in total seclusion, within these five new jagged wounds of deconstructed and malformed sonic terror, sole mastermind A. White has taken his horrific strain of noise-infested black/death decimation to new and absolutely implausible heights of aural insanity. Void of Infinite Horror is a claustrophobic, abominable, twisted, and horrific mosaic of modern and visionary extreme metal which has once again managed to violently coerce together the grandiose and bludgeoning sonic warfare of black/death bands like Teitanblood and Impetuous Ritual, and the massacring industrial noise scarifications of entities like Gnaw Their Tongues, Sutekh Hexen, and Abruptum.

VESSEL OF INIQUITY
Void of Infinite Horror

1. Invocation of the Heart Girt With a Serpent
2. Babalon
3. Void of Infinite Sorrow
4. Mother of Abomination
5. Once More Into the Abyss

With a cascading hail of twisted and deformed riffs funneled into a firestorm of blasting drum machines Void of Infinite Horror is hallucinatory maelstrom of hellish and apocalyptic atmospheres that will stand as one of the most absurd and utterly horrific releases to see the light year - its hopeless misery near indescribable, its violence and malevolence awe inducing in their monstrous enormity.

Invisible Oranges have exclusively just premiered the track Mother of Abomination from this upcoming offering of total sonic warfare, claiming that the track is “a five-minute bruiser steeped in swaths of grinding, churning noise“ - (you can read their feature and listen to track HERE). All formats now pre-ordeable through our store and Bandcamp and officially releasing on January 25 2019 through Sentient Ruin (US) and Xenoglossy Productions(EU).

ALTARAGE: Sentient Ruin To Issue Monstrous Third LP "The Approaching Roar" on Cassette Tape Format.

We’re honored and proud to work with our friends Altarage again. After having issued their debut demo and first LP NIHL on cassette in collaboration with Sol Y Nieve and having since witnessed the band’s unstoppable and vertical climb to world domination, we could not be happier be a part of their music again, and aid them once again in their unstoppable quest for absolute aural tyranny.

Since 2015 the Spanish Death Metal monsters have been making eyes roll and have instigated consistent and widespread awe and acclaim as their monstrous formula of malformed, grandiose, chaotic, and appallingly crushing music has opened new realms of absurdity and implausibility in extreme metal. Through three albums in three years of methodical, maniacal, and unyielding destruction, Altarage have slowly, but surely refined their formula to a point in which it is now a free form aesthetic of death metal, and a world entirely their own, accessible by and to no one else but themselves.

Their new album, The Approaching Roar - which we’re honored to issue as a limited edition tape - stands higher than any point in their career, dominating over and undergrund which for the most part is incapable and or unworthy of holding match up to their gargantuan artistry. As words truly defy the album and struggle to piece together its otherworldly enormity, we’ll leave it to that, and just reiterate that it already ridiculizes most death metal albums you will hear this year, and beyond.

The Approaching Roar tapes feature alternate artwork from the CD/LP, and come housed in the classic Sentient Ruin black custom slipcase silkscreened with metallic inks, and will be officially released on the album’s officially release date through Season of Mist: January 25 2015 - and now be pre-ordered on our Store and Bandcamp. All hail Altarage!